US congressional Democrats want to ban Pentagon propaganda on the Iraq War, but they are likely to find that enforcement is easier said than done.
An existing legal prohibition, for example, did not deter a Pentagon program aimed at influencing retired military officers frequently interviewed in the media. It also did not prevent a culture within the administration of US President George W. Bush that former White House spokesman Scott McClellan said favored propaganda over honesty in selling the war to the public.
And what is propaganda anyway? Nearly every press briefing involves a military or civilian official trying to influence the public.
Last month, the House of Representatives passed legislation to prohibit the military from engaging in “any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes or behavior of the people of the United States in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”
The bill reinforces a propaganda restriction already on the books, included in the Pentagon’s more than half-trillion-dollar annual budget bill and long embraced as Pentagon policy.
“I think it would be difficult to implement,” said Anthony Pratkanis, co-author of the book Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, of any law attempting to prohibit the military from promoting itself.
“What we really need is a norm that respects the role of the military” as independent from the executive branch, said Pratkanis, a social psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “It’s more the responsibility of a president to sell his policies and not hide behind the military.”
On April 20, the New York Times uncovered a six-year Pentagon program that cultivated several dozen military analysts to generate favorable news coverage on the war. Retired military generals were fed talking points, taken on trips to Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, given access to classified intelligence and briefed by senior defense officials, according to e-mails, transcripts and other records provided to the Times and eventually released by the Defense Department.
That the officers maintained extensive ties to the Pentagon after retirement was not surprising, as is customary. But the program seemed to unfairly reward these new media personalities and the defense companies that employed them as lobbyists with plum access to the department so long as the retired officers spoke in favor of the war.
The Defense Department has shut down the program pending an internal review. Both the department inspector general’s office and the Government Accountability Office are investigating whether the effort violated any rules, including if it gave some contractors a competitive advantage by employing the retired officers as lobbyists.
The House included the propaganda ban in next year’s defense authorization bill. The Senate plans to debate its version of the defense bill this summer.
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